MWC14: We Go Hands On with HTC's New Desire 816

Today while at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona, we were able to sit down with HTC’s J.B. McRee and take a look at the company’s latest phone, launched here at MWC 14, the Desire 816. While this phone’s actual name doesn’t really lend to it’s actual purpose within the market, it can be simply summed up as a very high-quality mid-range phone designed to be affordable but still bring HTC’s unparalleled quality and design. While HTC isn’t actually giving pricing on this phone quite yet, they did say that it would be priced closer to launch with carriers around the world and that can be expected around the second quarter of this year. Meaning that we’ll probably know exactly how much this quality phone will cost after March.

The phone itself is an interesting combination of technologies and features as it has a massive 5.5" screen while only being 720P in resolution. This results in a relatively low PPI of 267, however, there is still a market for phones that have big screens and a 720P resolution isn’t necessarily bad for a 5.5" but it isn’t necessarily good either. The phone itself will ship with 8 GB of internal storage and will support microSD cards up to 64 GB, meaning that this phone should be relatively affordable due to the lack of NAND. It will, however, have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad core chip with an Adreno 305 GPU. Since it is a Snapdragon 400, it will only support 3G bands, but there is a chance we could see an LTE version with something like a Snapdragon 410 later on.

It will come in five colors, as seen above, missing the black version.

It also has a unique 5 megapixel front-facing camera that does 720P video. HTC’s phones have been the best, in my experience in taking front-facing cameras. And in fact, have been the best for taking pictures with friends while still being able to hold the phone. It also has a 13 megapixel back main camera, which doesn’t look to be anything like HTC’s Ultrapixel camera, but should still deliver a fairly good photography experience.

My favorite color was the deep blue one, and even though we weren’t allowed to play with the new user interface, I still really like the deep blue color and feel of the phone. See more pictures of it below.